Hoax ads called for rape in revenge

Prosecutors say bogus postings amount to a crime; defendant says it was prank that got out of control

San Diego  Consumed with bitterness over losing her Carmel Valley dream home to a couple with a higher bid, Kathy Rowe found an outlet for her anger: revenge.

But what she is calling a childish prank, prosecutors say was a perverse scheme to have a woman raped.

The payback against the young husband and wife homebuyers started mildly enough, court records show. Putting a stop on their mail. Signing them up for catalogs for incontinence supplies. Sending religious missionaries to their doorstep.

It’s what Rowe did next that could send her to prison.

She posed as the wife in online adult entertainment ads titled “Carmel Valley Freak Show,” inviting strange men over to the couple’s home for sex and describing scenarios of a rape fantasy to those who responded. The wife’s photo and address were included in the postings.

“I love to be surprised and have a man just show up at my door and force his way in the door and on me, totally taking me while I say no,” Rowe wrote to one man who responded.

One man decided to follow up on the offer, but was thwarted once by a locked gate and a second time when the husband answered the door.

A legal dispute is now brewing over the felony charges Rowe faces in connection with the postings.

The state appeals court ruled on Friday that Rowe, 52, will have to answer to felony charges of solicitation of rape and solicitation of sodomy — two charges that a Superior Court judge had previously dismissed from the case.

At issue is Rowe’s intent. Did she really mean for her to be raped? Does it even matter?

Pranks escalate

Rowe, a county administrative analyst, thought she had found the perfect home for her family in 2011. It was a single story, to accommodate her severely disabled daughter, and had a pool, to provide exercise for her husband following a heart attack.

But due to miscommunication with real estate agents, and a more attractive bid from the other couple, she lost the house.

In a letter to a judge, Rowe described the moment as “devastating.”

“The anger and grief over losing that house (and especially in the way we did) drove me to behave in a very childish way and to do what I thought were childish pranks to let off steam and ease the pain,” Rowe said. “I never intended for them to be hurtful.”

The couple, as well as their lawyer, did not respond to a request for an interview.

According to detailed court filings in the case, Rowe first tried to buy the home from the couple, sending them a letter offering them $100,000 above the asking price. It was declined. Then weird things started to happen.

The husband testified during a preliminary hearing that about a month after he and his wife moved in, people came by the door interested in a “for sale” posting on the real estate website Zillow.

By Christmas, mail had stopped coming to the house. A stop had been issued in his wife’s name.

A strange assortment of books and magazines also started to appear in their mailbox.

In February 2012, the husband learned that Valentine’s Day cards had been sent in his name to many of the wives in the neighborhood.

After getting a strange call about his property taxes, he did a Google search for his wife’s name. What he found was shocking. There was his wife’s photo with ads for “Carmel Valley Adult Entertainment.”

“Adult entertainment of all types when my husband is not home. Not for the faint of heart,” one posting read.

Further searches found a posting for a high school New Year’s Eve party at their house, and a Fourth of July Mexican fireworks giveaway.

He called police.

Explicit emails

The postings left the couple frightened, and mystified.

“They were definitely terrified,” said Deputy District Attorney Brendan McHugh. “They went out and got all kinds of security.”

The prosecutor even requested police do extra patrols by their home.

Law enforcement traced the computer address of the online postings to Rowe. A search of her Carmel Valley apartment turned up a number of explicit emails to two men who had responded to the ads.

“Just stop by any Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-3 p.m. I like the element of surprise,” Rowe had written one of the men.

When one of the men actually went to the house, but found a locked gate, Rowe wrote him back and encouraged him to try again, court records show. The man did later that day, but was surprised when the husband answered the door.

“I had to make an excuse for why I was there,” the man wrote Rowe back later.

Rowe stopped communicating with the men after that. She said she became disturbed when one of the men sent her a nude photo.

By July, the Rowes had found a new home that fit their needs, and she turned her focus elsewhere.

“While I am ashamed of my actions, I did not do things which I thought were harmful or scary,” Rowe said in a letter to the judge. She said if the couple had contacted her, she would have stopped.

“But because I never heard from anyone, I never knew if these activities were noticed or the impact they were having on the family.”

She said the scheme was an outlet of sorts for her, as she was coping with being the sole caretaker for her teenage daughter, who has a genetic disorder that gives her the intellect of a 4- to 5-year-old.

She described the constant care for the girl — sleeping in a chair at her bedside each night and driving her to 100 doctor appointments each year — while still holding down one to two jobs to pay for the medical costs. Both she and her husband suffer health problems of their own.

Friends and colleagues have also weighed in, writing supportive letters to the judge.

Intent questioned

Rowe was arrested in October 2012 and charged with the solicitation charges, as well as four counts of identity theft and one count of misdemeanor harassment.

After a preliminary hearing, San Diego Superior Court Judge Runston Maino dismissed the two solicitation charges, ruling that he didn’t have a strong suspicion that Rowe intended the men to actually rape the homebuyer. He called the men who responded to the ads “wimpish guys who didn’t appear to intend to go through with a rape, a scenario they thought would be consensual."

Maino also reduced the four counts of identity theft to misdemeanors.

Superior Court Judge Joan Weber reviewed the decision at the request of the District Attorney’s Office and upheld it.

Prosecutors, in their appeal, said the language Rowe used in her emails couldn’t have been more clear in the intent. They said Rowe’s instruction to the men “is not only the product of a deeply disturbed mind, it is also the description of forcible rape.”

A divided three-judge panel of the state appeals court agreed, ruling prosecutors had met the burden of proof to allow the solicitation charges to be argued at trial.

Solicitation becomes a crime when a verbal request is made with criminal intent, the judges said. “The harm is in the asking, and it is punishable irrespective of the reaction of the person solicited,” the court said, quoting case law.

Justice Alex McDonald penned a dissenting opinion, saying the evidence in the case concerns consensual sex. Even the language suggesting force is done in a manner to make the consensual encounter “more exciting,” he said.

Rowe’s attorney, Charles Sevilla, said Tuesday that he agreed with the dissenting opinion, that Rowe had “no felonious intent for these men to commit sex crimes.”

Sevilla said he plans to petition for a rehearing by the appeals court, or appeal to the state Supreme Court.

If Rowe loses, then the felony charges will be added to her misdemeanor case.